Measuring and Understanding Throughput of Network Topologies

Abstract: High throughput is of particular interest in data center and HPC networks. Although myriad network topologies have been proposed, a broad head-to-head comparison across topologies and across traffic patterns is absent, and the right way to compare worst-case throughput performance is a subtle problem. In this paper, we develop a framework to benchmark the throughput of network topologies, using a two-pronged approach. First, we study performance on a variety of synthetic and experimentally-measured traffic matrices (TMs). Second, we show how to measure worst-case throughput by generating a near-worst-case TM for any given topology. We apply the framework to study the performance of these TMs in a wide range of network topologies, revealing insights into the performance of topologies with scaling, robustness of performance across TMs, and the effect of scattered workload placement. Our evaluation code is freely available.